| Original Transmission
1: The Hungry Earth
2: Cold Blood
Cast The Doctor Matt Smith
Crew Written by Chris Chibnall
The Doctor, Amy and Rory land in the small Welsh village of Cwmtaff in 2020, as opposed to their intended destination of Rio de Janeiro. They encounter a mining operation, led by Doctor Nasreen Chaudry, studying minerals deep in the earth that have not been seen for over 20 million years. Nasreen is accompanied by a local, Tony Mack, whose daughter and grandson, Ambrose and Elliot, are examining the disappearance of bodies from underground at the graveyard of a nearby church. An earth tremor causes the ground to open and send Tony and Amy falling into it; Tony is rescued but Amy is pulled under by unknown forces. The Doctor surmises the minerals form a bio-reactive defense system that was triggered by the drilling operation. The group is soon alerted to the presence of three life forms traveling up the drilling shaft from 21 kilometres below the earth, and they barricade themselves in the church. The Doctor explains Amy's disappearance to Rory and assures him he will get her back. The three beings turn out to be reptilian humanoids, and in a scuffle, they capture Elliot and strike Tony with a venomous forked tongue; the Doctor and the group are able to subdue one of the beings while the other two retreat with Elliot back into the earth. The Doctor realises the beings are a new form of Silurians, and that they have relented in their attack since both sides hold a hostage. The captured Silurian calls herself Alaya, a member of the warrior caste awoken by the intrusion of the drill. Alaya believes, as with all the other Silurians, that the Earth still belongs to them, the drilling was a form of attack by the humans and they will defeat humanity eventually. Tony, suffering from the effects of the venom, believes they should dissect Alaya, but the Doctor warns that it will be seen as an act of war. The Doctor decides to travel in the TARDIS down the drilling shaft to talk to the rest of the Silurians and work out a truce, with Narseen desiring to come along.
Amy awakens to find herself strapped to an examining table, near to where Ambrose's husband Mo is also ensnared. Mo apologizes to Amy that the Silurians intended to vivisect them. The Doctor and Nasreen descend in the TARDIS, where the Doctor explains about the Silurians and that he only expects to encounter a small number of the creatures. The show ends on a cliffhanger as the Doctor and Nasreen are surprised to find an immense Silurian civilisation stretching out for miles in the caverns below the earth. As the Doctor and Nasreen arrive by TARDIS in the massive Silurian civilisation deep under the earth, they are quickly captured and taken to be examined by the Silurian doctor, Malohkeh. Meanwhile, Amy and Mo, already strapped to tables, manage to escape; before they can sneak away, Mo discovers his son, Elliot, sedated in a chamber and under observation, angering him and forcing the two to take up weapons. While Nasreen is sedated, the Doctor is subjected to excruciating pain by Malohkeh until he realizes the Doctor is not human. The leader of the Silurian warrior caste, Restac, arrives and insists the two be destroyed, and escorts them to a Silurian court; though Amy and Mo interrupt the trial, they too are soon captured.
It is soon clear that there is a power struggle within the Silurians, as Eldane, Restac's superior, is called into the situation by Malohkeh and demands a temporary halt to the hostilities despite Restac's demands. The Doctor makes contact with Rory, Ambrose (Mo's wife) and Tony (her father), reminding them to keep their captive Silurian, Alaya, alive as a means to prevent further hostilities, unaware that Ambrose has killed Alaya with a taser when the Silurian taunted her about Tony after Ambrose tried to force her to cure him. The Doctor works with Eldane to initiate talks between the humans, represented by Amy and Nasreen, and the Silurians on working together with their technology to end the conflict, and arranges for the exchange of hostages. Rory, Ambrose, and Tony, worried about the Silurian reaction when they discover Alaya's death, set the drill to burrow further and self-destruct fifteen minutes after they depart, which would destroy the Silurian oxygen supply and kill them all.
Meanwhile, Restac, furious at the humans' intervention, has killed Malohkeh for his betrayal and awoken numerous others of her warrior caste, expecting to stage a coup against Eldane. When Rory and the others arrive with Alaya's corpse, Restac becomes furious and orders the humans' death; the Doctor is able to temporarily disable their weapons to give him, Eldane, and the humans time to escape and bar themselves into Malohkeh's lab. When the Doctor learns about the drill's self-destruction, he and Eldane realize they can use Silurian technology to destroy the drill before it harms the civilisation, but will cause their exit route to collapse if they cannot reach the TARDIS in time. Eldane devises a way to force the warriors to return to hibernation by initiating a "toxic fumigation" to allow the humans to escape, and hopes that in a thousand years, peace between humans and Silurians can occur. Tony, still affected by venom from Alaya's sting, opts to stay behind to be cured, and Nasreen also decides to remain behind in order to study the earth from below and help to improve human-Silurian relations.
The Doctor, Amy, Rory, and Ambrose's family escape to the TARDIS. There, they find a crack in the cavern wall, similar to ones they have seen before emanating from an explosion in time. The Doctor, surmising that an explosion leaves shrapnel behind, reaches into the crack and pulls out an object that frightens him. Before he can explain, Restac, dying from the toxic exposure, fires upon the Doctor, but Rory pushes him out of the way and fatally takes the shot. As Rory dies in Amy's arms, he is confused for having thought they had seen a future version of themselves when they had arrived in the TARDIS. Rory's body is absorbed by the crack, the Doctor realising that Rory will be written out of history due to the nature of the crack. The Doctor forces Amy to board the TARDIS before the drill explodes, and tries to help her concentrate on remembering Rory but a jolt from the TARDIS causes her to lose her concentration, and her memories of Rory are lost. The Doctor finds Amy's engagement ring, which Rory had stowed before the events, on the floor of the TARDIS.
On the surface, Ambrose thanks the Doctor for not letting the Silurians kill her after she had killed Alaya; the Doctor asks her to seek repentance by preparing humanity for their next encounter with the Silurians. The Doctor and Amy return to the TARDIS, this time seeing only a vision of a future Amy on the nearby hillside. Before leaving, the Doctor pulls out the object he pulled from the crack—a burnt piece of the TARDIS doors, and worriedly compares it to the real thing. Aside from the damage, they appear identical.
I didn't really enjoy this one as much as I thought I would with a classic enemy coming back and all. The central problem was that not enough plot was stretched into two 45 minute slots. It would have been better to have had one sixty or seventy minute story. In fact, I think many of this season’s episodes would have benefited from being an hour long. Victory of the Daleks would have allowed longer to dwell on the idea of patriotic Daleks doing their bit for the war effort before they got into the mischief. The Beast Below could have expanded on the point of the Smilers. In sixty minutes a tight, fast-paced story about Silurians and humans could have been told. I didn’t mind that the Silurians had become a bit more humanoid and now had two sexes. That was easily explained by The Doctor in two lines about meeting a different sub-species in the past. The idea of the military caste being female is an ironic notion and very well done.
What I really did like about them was the two pacifists, the medical Silurian, Malohkeh, and the leader, Eldane, who sought to make peace with humanity. The idea of Amy and Nasreen representing humanity in that conference between species was fantastic. It worked perfectly as a plot device. It would have worked as a means of sharing the Earth, too, if not for the impulsive humans like Ambrose. Her dilemma, as the one who wrecked the peace chances by accidentally killing the hostage, Alaya, was well acted and well scripted, but it was one of the sections that could have been pared down to the stark essentials in a longer single episode. The sets creating the Silurian world were beautifully done and a far cry from the tight studio sets of classic Doctor Who. They were one of the highlights of this story.
Of course, the main reason for this being a two parter was to allow for the long ending with Rory’s death and The Doctor discovering that the crack in the universe contains a fragment of his destroyed TARDIS. Killing off a main character can’t be done in a rush. It deserved that time and was the one thing that warranted this being a double episode. It was a shock to all, of course. The death of Rory was a closely guarded secret from the press. It is a rare thing to have a companion die. Adric was the last one, back in 1983. I think more people actually mourned Rory this time around. He had become a useful, likeable character. But the fact that he is in the cast lists for the finale episodes gives everyone hope that being erased from time can be undone.
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